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areoformtoday at 1:49 AM2 repliesview on HN

I have a perspective on this that will read as unkind to these people, but that's not my intention. I respect and even admire what they're trying to do. I just think the effort is maladaptive and misplaced.

Without directly touching one of the many, many third rails that are present here, I'd like to present this section from Google's Gemma paper on how they did their CBRN review;

    > In addition to our internal evaluations described above (Section 5.7) capabilities in chemistry and biology were assessed by an external group who conducted red teaming designed to measure the potential scientific and operational risks of the models.
    >
    > A red team composed of different subject matter experts (e.g. biology, chemistry, logistics) were tasked to role play as malign actors who want to conduct a well-defined mission in a scenario that is presented to them resembling an existing prevailing threat environment. Together, these experts probe the model to obtain the most useful information to construct a plan that is feasible within the resource and timing limits described in the scenario. The plan is then graded for both scientific and logistical feasibility. Based on this assessment, GDM addresses any areas that warrant further investigation.
    >
    > External researchers found that the model outputs detailed information in some scenarios, often providing accurate information around experimentation and problem solving. However, researchers found steps were too broad and high level to enable a malicious actor.
To simplify what they're saying here, they did the CB equivalent of googling "how to make bomb" and got back the recipe of gunpowder / the many explosive compounds humans have made.

This was the "test" for CBRN assistance capabilities.

Note, I don't fault the model team at all for this. I think that present AI-research happened in a very particular environment, and that environment is far removed from the more mundane reality of how threats play out in most parts of the world. In a way, arguably, it's group-think inducing a community-wide failure of imagination and a systemic misunderstanding of reality.

Basically, they are trying to do their best, but they're in over their heads.


Replies

SubiculumCodetoday at 5:05 AM

You didn't actually say what you found wrong

selimthegrimtoday at 2:49 AM

Having been one of those CBRN testers (not necessarily on Gemma) I can tell you it’s a little bit more involved than that.

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